Wide Awake On the Edge of the World

A rather harrowing weekend, I think it would be fair to say.

I had to go to a meeting in a small town in Bedfordshire on Saturday. What with it being about 90 miles away, and the meeting itself being a couple of hours, that was most of the day gone.

Whilst I'd been enjoying the thrills of Britain's motorway system, K___ had been picked up by Suzy (I was going to write S___, but since she's forever coming on here and commenting every time we mention her, using a Blogger name that makes it abundantly clear what her real name is, I'm not going to bother) and spent the afternoon with her and her three kids, her husband, our friend M (who again does not require underscores because he really does go under the name 'M') another couple of their friends and the bloke who had turned up to rip out the old and install a new kitchen without any warning that he was going to do so. Plus another couple of kids and a dad. Oh, and the other mum and three kids that arrived as we were leaving. A little bit of a mad house it's not unreasonable to say, though in the nicest possibly way, of course.

K___ had been there for most of the afternoon by the time I arrived and Olivia hadn't spent very much of it asleep, and we know what a baby without much sleep means. Horrible evening. Continuing the sleep theme, my Dad called up to say that my brother was going to be down for the night, and could they please have their pillows back that they'd lent us? Since we had bought replacements and had them on the spare bed for a good while now, it really was a little naughty not to have given them back before now. With all of this in mind, we left Suzy's quite soon afterwards.

With just a quick stop at ours to pick up the pillows, it was round to my folks'. Thereafter followed a misunderstanding about waking Olivia that, a couple of hours later, resulted in K___ and I shouting at each other. I'm not going to go into details, because neither of us come out of it looking terribly great - it was fundamentally rather trivial, and raking it up again for your enjoyment, dear reader, would be a bit tragic. The pertinent facts are that when it came to her last meal of the day, (taken as I sat in the other room stewing over our row), Olivia was extremely sleepy and reluctant to drink. Eventually, K___ had to admit defeat after just two ounces of a usual six.

K___ and I made up after a bit of sitting in different rooms and smarting. We agreed that babies can frazzle you. At about eleven thirty - a little on the late side for us these days - we got up and went to our bedroom, expecting to quietly go to bed, a plan that was slightly scuppered by the sight of a tiny baby with glistening, slimy vomit caked over half her head and face, Grobag and mattress. We hadn't heard a thing. As K___ sorted a new Grobag and sheet for the baby's mattress, I took her into the bathroom and tried to get her cleaned up. The chuck was a mixture of milk and mucus and there was no way this was going to come off with just a sponge. She needed a full hair wash, so I had to wait for K___. Fortunately, Olivia seemed rather unfussed by the whole thing, even quite smiley. She certainly wasn't as fussed as one might imagine she'd be. We got her washed and dried and put into a new Grobag.

We decided that as the baby had only had two ounces anyway, we needed to feed her. It was clear that it had all come up in the incident, and it wasn't really on to expect her to sleep without any food. I made her a new bottle and K___ tried to get her to take it. We thought she'd be ravenous. Nope. After twenty minutes she'd given up and had barely had two ounces again. At least that was back to the starting position. We decided that if she was going to need feeding in the night, we'd just have to put up with it. There are plenty of new parents who have to do it, so it would hardly kill us.

We turned out the light, and started to settle. It was five past midnight when the baby honked all over herself for the second time. Still, we thought as we settled down to sleep at half past twelve, at least Sunday can't be as bad...

Pain and Anger in the Howling Dark

When I got in last night, K___ revealed that Olivia had declined to sleep all day and was in a crotchety mood. She had been a bit of a rat bag the night before too. Cue five hours of hell with very little time off. That’s for me. K___ had had it for muuuuuuuuch longer.

Those of you without much experience of this - either because you're child-free or you're one of those lucky bastards with nicely behaved babies - will probably find it hard to understand how mentally and physically debilitating it is to have a deeply distressed child in your arms for any length of time. Welcome then, to the delights of a child with colic.

What is colic? Well, no one really knows, which is obviously brilliant news. Some definitions I’ve seen say simply that it’s ‘more than three hours of continuous crying’, in which case she’s got it. Others say it’s a pain in the gut – the word is etymologically related to ‘colon’ - perhaps related to trapped wind. One source I found on the Interwebulator simply suggested it was a word used by paediatricians when they just don’t know what in the name of buggery is wrong.

But what causes it, I hear you say? Well, they don’t really know that either. It may be a response to an over-stimulating world, it may be trapped wind. Apparently it might even be an attempt to communicate that ‘something is wrong’, although that seems like specious and circular reasoning to me.

What symptoms are there then? Mainly, it’s the screaming. Screaming that goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on pretty much without change for hours, unless it is to find some even more distressing sound to tear holes in Mummy and Daddy’s hearts. Sometimes changing the position of the baby will stop her for a moment or two, just long enough for you to dare to hope she might settle, before starting again, as though this is some sort of Sysiphean torture.

The fact is that ‘torture’ is an extremely appropriate word. It’s torture for Olivia and it’s torture for us. K___ and I have both been brought to tears by it. When you know that your baby is warm and fed and in a clean nappy and doesn’t want to suck on a soother or a finger and turns purple every time you put her down, when you have tried all of these things and she is still in acute distress, the sense of helplessness and the feelings of frustration and failure are overwhelming.

It can also make you irritable. In fact, not just irritable. On a couple of occasions, the despair has got far closer to anger than either of us would have liked. You hear of people who get to the end of their tethers and hurt their babies. Whilst I obviously don't condone it at all, I can understand where that anger comes from and it might only take a lack of maturity and self-awareness that splits those people from the majority of us who control themselves.

We’re lucky. We both recognise when we’ve reached breaking point, and we know to give the baby to the other, or put her down and go into the other room or put her in the buggy and go for a walk.

Sometimes, worn down by the grind of sensory overload and sleep deprivation, we have both briefly wondered whether we have made a mistake in having a baby and yearned for life b.c. (before crying). We've sat and talked about it and we've both admitted having felt these negative emotions. We both feel like we’re bad parents and bad people for feeling like this.

It turns out, from talking to colleagues and friends, and reading up on it, that the sort of people who think these awful things are called ‘parents’ and it’s far more common than you - or at least ‘we’ – had imagined. It is a big relief to know that other people understand and that you come out of the other side of it.

However, none of this guilt and angsting helps the tiny girl with the purple face and the Marshall Amplifier screams very much. It merely stops another (much worse) problem being added on top. She’s still in distress.

When I talked about it with the admin assistant in my team, I asked, 'So, what did you do when your kids had colic?'
'Drop kicked them off the balcony,' she said.